Performance analysis of different configurations of heating and cooling for a multi-zone building

Abstract

Multi-zone HVAC designing is important as the considerable amount of the world's energy is used for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. Hospitals are one of the most critical multi-zone buildings. So, proper designing of multi-zone building will lead toward high savings in energy in this sector. Most common types of configurations are; constant volume with reheat (CVHr), dual duct (DD), and variable air volume (VAV) system. The key objective of the current research is to investigate the impact of operational zoning and HVAC system operation strategies on energy performance of a hospital by maintaining the desired comfort conditions. The hospital building is divided into five zones including ward, pharmaceutical, office and OT. The building load is calculated for each zone and optimised for creating the multi-zone building that resulted 52 ton. Then after proper designing of central system based on absorption cooling system to achieve this load, different air distribution system configurations are designed for each zone to determine required air flow rate in terms of cubic fit per min (CFMs). Afterwards, energy simulations are used by developing different models in TRACE 700 for forecasting the best air distribution system for each zone. The results show that COP of absorption chiller is 0.78. Additionally, the economic and cooling capacity analysis of each configuration in terms of net present value (NPV) resulted that the dual duct configuration in most efficient manner for multi-zone buildings such as hospitals.